My Imaginary Boyfriends.

In the pantheon of my imaginary boyfriends, John Lennon was a big step up.

Starting in about fourth grade, I felt it was important to always be in love with someone. These relationships were, for the most part, very successful because no participation was ever required from the object of my affection. It also didn’t matter in the least that none of them were aware that the relationship even existed.

A few of these lucky guys were in my class at school but many more were guys on TV. And where the latter was concerned, when you take into account how inappropriate the actual age discrepancy between myself and any of these guys would have been if we ever had the misfortune of meeting in real life, all I can say is that it’s a damn good thing there was no possibility that it would ever happen.

Nevertheless, because I kept diaries from fifth grade forward, I am aware of how busily I was prepping for the sophisticated life of a teenager I assumed was around the corner. Here is a replica of a real page from one of my diaries in which I was grappling with figuring out the critical timing for my future grooming schedule.

For the record, not all of my diary pages were so forward thinking. Quite a few of the real pages were significantly less informative. This is a photo of a real diary page.

Meanwhile, where my love-life was concerned, I was totally basing all of what I imagined in my fantasies on stories I read in Seventeen Magazine. They contained a lot of running into a doorway to escape the wind, the rain and the fog. There was also quite a bit of staring out at the ocean toward a distant horizon. And for the record, it’s important to add at this point that I had NO CLUE about how sex worked. I was familiar with the idea of kissing. But I assumed that all that kissing lead only to sweeping feelings of love so intense that a swelling crescendo from Tchaikovsky was required to adequately describe them. I also assumed that at some point, someone would give me an expensive piece of glittering jewelry as a memento , possibly a necklace, before they left me alone in the rain with my thoughts.

Neither of my parents were too enthusiastic about this new TV-and-Boy-Obsessed version of their daughter, despite the fact that 100% of the boys were living in another dimension. The following are re-drawn but verbally accurate excerpts from real pages in my pre-teen diaries.

Occasionally, one of the guys I loved existed in real life. But under no circumstances did their actual physical proximity to me do anything to change the trajectory of our imaginary love.

Sadly I never got to act on my elaborate plans to meet Skippy because, much to my shock and horror, when I was in ninth grade, my parents decided to move the family from Florida to California. Against my will, they took me hostage and forced me to re-start school on a different coast. Unsurprisingly, I felt lost.

As a member in good standing of the pre-frontal lobe set, the solution to all my problems was OBVIOUS. I needed a cool boyfriend immediately.

For a girl who was as obsessed with finding a boyfriend as I appeared to be, I definitely continued to have some controversial ideas about sex.

On the bright side, (and without meaning to cast any aspersions on Skippy, who I confess I can not remember at all) the emotional turmoil I was feeling resulted in a DRAMATIC UPGRADE in the quality of my imaginary boyfriends.

The relationship between John and I seemed to be off to a great start when I heard on the radio that The Beatles were going to perform at ‘The Cow Palace’, a venue not all that far from where we now lived. I mobilized immediately and somehow managed to come up with the enormous sum of SIX DOLLARS I needed to buy a ticket. How could I not take advantage of an opportunity to share the same oxygen molecules with my one true love?

Here is what I wrote in my diary 4 days before the big event. Even back then, I was already exhibiting my signature brand of optimism: “This Wednesday I will meet my death at The Cow Palace, caught in a cyclone of screaming. I am embarrassed to be associating with the type of girl who will be attending. Though I have to admit, I am looking forward to the excitement.”

And here is the review of the concert that I wrote in my diary after I got home . Denni was the name of a new California friend who was also a Beatle fan and so agreed to go with me. And weirdly, NEXT SUNDAY is the one millionth anniversary of this momentous occasion.

Yep. Leave it to me to give my one true love a bad review. And with that, another one of my imaginary romances dissolved into wisps of vapor. Whooosh. Interestingly, within a couple of months, I began analyzing my decimated love life and realizing that my motives were not what they appeared to be.

Okay, I was definitely still a delusional goofball. But also at the same moment in time, I was turning into myself. What a relief it was for the current version of me to get to this page.

At some point, in the seventies, Gloria Steinem was famously quoted as saying something like “We are all turning into the men we used to want to marry.” In a way, I think I was trying to say a far more clueless and less carefully worded version of the same thing.

The stuff you have just read is a re-configuring of a few parts of a graphic novel I wrote that came out in 2020. It is called WE SAW SCENERY and if you are at all interested in how I got thru adolescence and turned into whatever this is that I am still pretending to be now, it is for sale in the usual places. Here is the cover.